All is Bright

All is Bright

Half-bright is Phil Morrison’s “All is Bright.” It is about fifty percent brilliant absurdist comedy in the low-key Bill Forsyth mode and the remainder is so much calculated mumbliness and crowd-pandering Christmastime cuteness that I’m predicting an “All is Bright” series will eventually end up on NBC’s Thursday night lineup. You could have a problem right up front (unfairly, I say) with the apparent passivity of the protagonist, Dennis (Paul Giamatti), a Quebeqois robber who learns only after being released from prison that his former accomplice and friend is dating the mother of his child.

Said wife (Amy Landecker) warns Dennis not to reveal himself to their tween daughter, whom she’s told her daddy died of cancer. Dennis has an instant fit of rage at the wife and later lands one punch on Rene (Paul Rudd), but how he doesn’t kill either of them in a passion crime isn’t revealed. Homeless and desperate for work, he tags along with his betrayer on a trip to New York to sell Christmas trees.

That’s not implausible, since most freshly released prisoners are masters at this kind of pragmatism reining in their emotions lest they be sent right back to hell and the implausible developments in “All is Bright” aren’t big things but tiny false moments here and there that ultimately undermine the delicately observed-and-true ones: 1) It’s hard to believe that guileless but emotionally intelligent Rene would be so brazen in disrespect toward Dennis as taking lovey-dovey phone calls from the woman he stole from Dennis right in front of him; that’s asking for another punch in the face or worse.

2) It’s tough for me personally to imagine a Homeland Security-era American border patrol officer so lax and bribeable as this film depicts the one who appears when Rene and Dennis go to New York to sell Christmas trees. 3) Sally Hawkins’ creamy Russian dressing accent makes you wonder whether there were no suitable Russian actresses available to play “sassy immigrant neighbor” in New York at the time of filming. (But I laughed out loud when she said, like Vunna White on ‘Fortune Wheel.’”)

4) Dennis’ psychotic bullying and mugging of an innocent rival tree salesman don’t square with the film’s desire to make him seem lovably harmless deep down or with the fact that, as a parolee illegally out of his home country, he’d be doing everything possible to lay low. 5) Diner owners in laid-back Greenpoint who are so obnoxious as to snatch Dennis out of their bathroom mid-pee because he isn’t a paying customer: This has never happened anywhere in Brooklyn. Worse yet, the moment is scored to a warm Christmas ballad, for leaden irony.

Much later, after he’s somehow made amends with the assholes and sets a few bills on the counter on route to the john, the same jerk who ejected him now accepts his cash with a sneering “Fuck you very much!” No part of this has ever happened anywhere.

Dennis and Rene take too many silly risks for the sake of rote (though well-played) comic set pieces, so it’s clear early on that Morrison and screenwriter Melissa James Gibson are interested in racking up yuks that might get them a Sundance Audience Award rather than what might be funny or suspenseful in a more real-world scenario. A comical jazz combo tells us not to take anything too seriously.

Which is a shame, because I sort of love where Morrison is coming from here, which seems like Capraesque sentimentality about good men going through hard times filtered through textured, layered Altman styling. Cinematographer W. Mott Hupfel III expertly captures the palpable winter chill you can practically smell the ratty beards and linty coats and feel the cold radiating off those lived in interiors in gorgeous medium-length takes and slow zooms right out of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” In one beautiful bit of Altmanesque overlap at the Brooklyn tree stand, a delicate zoom keeps two dueling conversations in frame and three flavorful accents African, Russian, Canadian in aural deep focus.

Giamatti and Rudd generally do their part to give this film some unpredictable life outside its surefire formulas; but Morrison just doesn’t take enough advantage of the neighborhood (which I lived in this summer, full disclosure, and can attest is teeming with far more interesting life forms than these stock extras we’re seeing) to make this quest seem situated within a world as opposed to against a (barely) colorful backdrop. This would better serve the subtext we’ve been given early on of an economic scramble as brisk and merciless as those winter winds.

But if cute is what you’re looking for this Christmas season, then “All Is Bright” has got cute for days: I wish I could give four stars to Giamatti’s big, sad eyes and Rudd’s outrageous Civil War beard. Rudd is great at playing the kind of friend whose bumbling makes you draw back a hand to slap him only to lower it gently on his head, like a beguiled puppy owner. That kind of thing will only get you so far, though; and by the time we hit this film’s pack-of-lies Christmas morning ending, the eggnog has curdled.

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